She was one of the barristers who represented 95 miners, a number from the North East, who faced life imprisonment after being falsely accused of riot and unlawful assembly following the bitter clash between thousands of police and pickets at the South Yorkshire coking plant.

After two and a half years of deliberation, the IPCC has decided not to conduct an investigation into South Yorkshire Police’s handling of due to the passage of time as the event took place 30 years ago. Its probe started in 2012 after South Yorkshire police referred itself to the commission.

IPCC deputy chairman Sarah Green added that: “Because the miners arrested at Orgreave were acquitted or no evidence offered, there are no miscarriages of justice due to alleged police failures for the IPCC to investigate. Allegations of offences amounting to minor assaults could not be prosecuted due to the passage of time; and as many of the police officers involved in events at Orgreave are retired, no disciplinary action could be pursued.”

Ms Baird said: “The IPCC has found assault by police but, as those who were involved in the trials have always described, further found evidence of conspiracy to pervert justice by detectives dictating false statements to junior officers and perjury by repeating these lies on oath in court. Yet they decline to investigate, in effect saying that their powers and resources are too limited.

“The deputy chair of the IPCC perversely uses the hard-won collapse of the trial after nine weeks to argue that an inquiry is not in the public interest ‘Because the miners arrested at Orgreave were acquitted or no evidence offered, there are no miscarriages of justice’.

“Ninety five hard working men were on bail for over a year, charged with riot which then carried a life sentence, on the basis of largely made-up evidence.

Police officers move into the picket lines at the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham in Yorkshire in early March 1984 (Image: PA Wire)

“One of my clients in the trial told me of waking in terror night after night, in fear of a life behind bars without his family and locked in with murderers and rapists. The trial was a determined effort to criminalise miners to discredit their fight for jobs and the violence used by police on the day was presumably to frighten others off the picket line. Officers from most police forces in the country played a part, co-ordinated by South Yorkshire police, and Cabinet papers have disclosed how closely the Thatcher Government was involved in a strategy to destroy the coal industry.

“It has taken the IPCC two and a half years to find that this job is too big for them. The government should not now delay further but set up a Hillsborough-style panel to inquire fully into the wrongdoing which was evident to all those in the trial and is now essentially confirmed by the IPCC.”